Not so long ago, when talking about the Xbox Preview Program and the games contained therein, I expressed the idea that it was starting to look oddly like a roster of PC titles. As it turns out, my original projection wasn't so far off after all, and some are already saying that Xbox One's Phil Spencer is out to take out the distinctions between Xbox One and a Windows 10 gaming PC, a development we're already starting to see.

First we saw "The Long Dark" and "Elite: Dangerous" make the migration, but there were plenty of others to follow, including "Ark: Survival Evolved" and "We Happy Few." But there were others as well afoot, ranging from "Sheltered" to "Day Z," titles that were formerly seen on PC, but looked to make the jump. The title roster wasn't the only place to see this sort of thing, either, and for the last decade, Phil Spencer has been pushing to make the Xbox One and the Windows PC a lot more interchangeable.

Spencer runs Xbox, and has since 2014, but he's been making mention of Windows about as often as he has Xbox, by some reports. Indeed, some even suggest that he's no longer really the head of Xbox so much as he is the head of gaming at Microsoft. It's come quite some way, too; it's hard to forget the disaster that was E3 2013, at least for Microsoft. A confused vision that tried to be everything all at once left gamers wondering just where this was going, and how bad it would be for gamers when it got there. The idea of television on Xbox was a big part of things, seemingly to the detriment of the games, a huge problem for gamers. When Sony could basically win E3 with a short video featuring two staffers passing a disc from one hand to the other, it was clear that Microsoft's pitch not only wasn't clear in general, but the parts that were clear were clearly bad news.

But that's when Spencer stepped in, and changed the focus from entertainment to gaming, and brought in a lot of Windows to the process. The games were what the gamers were there for, and Spencer's understanding of that gave the Xbox One new life.

I admit to anyone who asks, and even some who don't, that I used to be a PC gamer. But back when I was a PC gamer, it involved a lot of tinkering and checking of specs. It wasn't like console gaming, where you slapped the game into the console and started playing. Admittedly, that's not really the case any more with mandatory installations and day one patches, but it's not too far off, either. But anyway; I kind of miss PC gaming, but with even less time now than I had before, getting back into it is a tall order. That's what's got me so excited about Microsoft's increasing connection between console and PC gaming. It's the best of both worlds; the huge array of games available for PC, the mod capabilities...these things are starting to show up in consoles, where the controls are simple and the games work right out of the box, or mostly so. Sure, it might not be the same experience--it likely won't be--but it's worth it to get access to a wider variety of titles on a limited level. Imagine how many Xbox One units would be sold if they could play PC games as well!

It seems that's the direction Microsoft is moving in, and if it can achieve anything even remotely similar, it might have some very good news ahead of it indeed. Oh, and so might we...the gamers.